Andy Reid: ‘There was no rift’ with Tyreek Hill

On Sunday, the NFL’s annual spring meetings got underway The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida. And just as you would expect, Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid is been rocking a Hawaiian shirt.

According to The Athletic’s Nate Taylor, Reid addressed last week’s trade of Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill to the Miami Dolphins.

Speaking at Monday’s coaches’ breakfast, Reid said that the team wanted to extend Hill’s contract, but the cost to do so was simply prohibitive.

“I love Tyreek,” said Reid. There was no [rift] with me and Tyreek. We tried to sign Tyreek at a certain cost.”

Reid said that while it wasn’t the only way the team could have handled the situation, it was the way that made the most sense.

“You can handle it any way you want to handle it. We handled it the way we did there,” said Reid, per Pro Football Talk. “We felt like Tyreek deserved an opportunity. We came in aggressive — and then after we got to a point, we just said, ‘Hey, listen, in this day and age, you have issues that you have to deal with with the cap,’ so we felt like it was better to allow him to go ahead and be traded. You can go different routes. You can play hardball with a player and do that — or you can kind of go about the way I did. Or we did.”

Reid said that Kansas City general manager Brett Veach can’t allow the salary cap to be far from the top of his mind.

“Listen, the cap never gets far away from your thought process, because you’re always dealing with it,” he said. “So Brett has got to sit in there and manage that with his guys — and if you want to keep consistency throughout years you’ve got to be able to do that and still stay at a high level.”

Reid then said that team can still feel comfortable about this move largely because they still have quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

“Obviously, Patrick’s a big part of that,” he said. “You want to surround him with good players — but that’s a sticky question, because we did try to sign Tyreek at a certain cost. Once it gets past that, now you can see what we’re doing here with the players we brought in, and we feel they’re very good football players. So we’ll see.

“I mean the end result is going to be what takes place during the season — but Brett’s building this thing back where we feel comfortable that we can go win on Sundays.”

League meetings will continue through Wednesday. If history is any guide, there will be more Hawaiian shirts. It’s also likely that there will be more questions about the trade that sent the superstar wideout to the Dolphins for three 2022 draft picks and two more in 2023, while opening $18.5 million in cap space for Kansas City.